This field experiment investigates how different levels of aggregation in relative performance information (RPI) impact employee performance in environments with multiple tasks. We randomly assign store employees of a retail chain to three groups: RPI on overall performance (control group), RPI on separate tasks, and RPI on both overall performance and separate tasks. We do not find evidence that providing separate task RPI instead of overall RPI affects performance or effort allocation. However, providing RPI on both overall performance and separate tasks seems to reduce performance, especially in the low-return task. This suggests that detailed RPI directs employees’ attention to the smaller benefits of low-return tasks. We further find that only 30.5% of the employees accessed their performance reports, highlighting a distinction between providing RPI in the field and the laboratory. This study is based on a registered report accepted by the Journal of Accounting Research.

中文翻译：

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多项任务的社会比较：为了本地卓越而牺牲整体绩效？

此现场实验研究了相对绩效信息 (RPI) 的不同聚合级别如何影响多任务环境中的员工绩效。我们将零售连锁店的商店员工随机分配到三组：总体绩效 RPI（对照组）、单独任务的 RPI 以及总体绩效和单独任务的 RPI。我们没有发现证据表明提供单独的任务 RPI 而不是整体 RPI 会影响绩效或工作量分配。然而，在整体性能和单独任务上提供 RPI 似乎会降低性能，尤其是在低回报任务中。这表明详细的 RPI 将员工的注意力引导到低回报任务的较小收益上。我们进一步发现，只有 30.5% 的员工访问了他们的绩效报告，这凸显了在现场提供 RPI 和在实验室提供 RPI 之间的区别。本研究基于《会计研究杂志》接受的注册报告。